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Interviews

Interviews are used prominently in naturalistic and qualitative research because they offer opportunities to collect data that are contextualized and individualized. Although interviews are often considered a hallmark of qualitative methods, it is important to note that they are also used in quantitative and mixed-methods research approaches. Depending on the study’s research questions and focus, the goals of interviews vary. Interviews can be used to understand individuals’ personal experiences, opinions, and perspectives related to an event or phenomenon. Researchers may examine how individuals’ experiences compare and contrast to other participants’ perspectives and/or prior research. In this regard, a researcher may use interviews to explore what is shared between participants and what may account for similarities in experiences as well as what is unique and different and what mediates or accounts for the range of experiences.

Interviews, as a form of data collection, are typically used when the goals of the research questions and study aim to understand how participants understand events and phenomena, develop detailed and contextualized descriptions of individuals’ perspectives, integrate the perspectives of different participants, and describe participants’ experiences and realities holistically. Because interviews help educational researchers understand individuals’ lived experiences as well as the range of and variation in individual experiences, opinions, and perspectives within a group or about a phenomenon, they are an important data source in educational research studies. Interview data can help educational scholars and practitioners understand schools and schooling from a variety of perspectives by providing data that are in-depth, individualized, and contextualized. This entry describes the ideal characteristics of interviews, explains the different types of and approaches to conducting interviews, provides an overview of important considerations for constructing interview instruments and conducting interviews, and discusses the processes of recording and transcribing interviews. The entry concludes by describing important considerations for using interview data.

Ideal Characteristics of Interviews

To develop interview data that are contextualized and individualized, researchers should have an understanding of certain characteristics of interviews. At the heart of these characteristics is the recognition that interviewing, like qualitative and naturalistic inquiry, is interpretative. Interpretivist research means that there are multiple realities and not universal truths. In this regard, researchers should acknowledge the relational, subjective, contextualized, and temporal nature of interviews.

Because the researcher is the primary instrument in qualitative research, the interactions between the researcher and participants, from recruitment through data collection and write up, constitute a relationship. Respect for participants, their beliefs, and their experiences should be prioritized. The researcher should also consider and address power dynamics that may manifest in this relationship. As a part of the interpretivist paradigm, interviews should be acknowledged as subjective and not objective truth because the subjective realities of the researcher and the participants impact the questions and data. It is important that researchers understand that multiple contexts shape individuals’ experiences and that they try to be as nonevaluative as possible while still recognizing that biases shape and inform all aspects of the research. These biases should be engaged with through reflexive practices in which researchers attempt to systematically assess the impact of their identity and subjectivities on the research. By identifying and reckoning with biases, researchers can try to resist imposing these through the use of evaluative language and nonverbal communication during interviews. However, researchers conducting interviews are not trying to be objective, but, rather, they recognize that the subjectivity of the researcher(s) mediates all aspects of how data are collected, analyzed, and interpreted.

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